The Italian Geographers’ Document on the University Education of Future Primary School Teachers

This article describes an important document compiled by a group of Italian geographers whoteach in the Teaching Sciences faculty. Twenty-two university professors in an online communitydebated concepts and compared ideas in order to establish content, methods and didacticapproaches to be applied when training Primary School teachers (pupils aged 3-10 yrs.) at ItalianUniversity to teach geography. The geographers involved started from an analysis of the recentscholastic reform, they discussed the theoretical aspects from the point of view of the currentgeographical debate and they decided upon the most efficient didactic approaches for trainingteachers and teaching geography to pupils. To this end, it was necessary to give considerablethought to the epistemological statutes relating to geography and to more active teaching methods,moving away from an approach based on descriptions and lists, the likes of which are no longersufficient for understanding today’s world.